They ignored the commands of their riders and landed, clustering all on one side of the knot of bandits. Then, as one, they half-reared and began furiously fanning the air with their wings.
A landing dragon had always kicked up a miniature kamiseen. This was eight dragons all blowing up sand and dust and purposefully aiming it at the humans, who were not expecting it.
Blinded, uttering cries of pain of their own as they dropped weapons and tried to shield their eyes, or clapped their hands over eyes full of sand, they stumbled backward, turning away from their attackers.
Only to be felled by arrows, javelins, and slung stones and lead bullets. Accustomed now to hitting running game at long range, the cluster of incapacitated bandits at short range was no challenge. They were armored—armor that, it appeared, had been salvaged from Tian and Altan officers—but nothing covered their throats, the backs of their legs, or their eyes.
The Jousters were ruthless. When they were finished, there were none of that group left standing. It left Kiron feeling a bit sick, but—
This was war, another sort of war, and this time he had not a lot of sympathy for the enemy. They preyed on the people who were only trying to make an honest copper, who already had to contend with wind and sandstorm and all the other hazards of trade. They stole and killed without provocation. He clenched his jaw and said nothing. The bandits could have surrendered, and the gods only knew what they were guilty of precisely, but they were—at the least—guilty of trying to rob people who had never harmed them.
It was a short, hot fight, but in the end, it was one-sided.
It took longer to round up the survivors. Some lay where they had fallen, wounded, or having thrown themselves to the ground, but others—
“We have runners, Captain,” said Kelet-mat, rider of a bronze-and-yellow beast of placid nature, when a half-dozen brigands waited, trussed hand and foot, in the sun. “What should we do about them?”
Kiron pondered that for a moment. “Do you think they’ll get anywhere?”
Kelet-mat grimaced, and raked his black hair out of his eyes with one hand. “I would have said ‘no,’ since there’s nothing but sand and scrub as far as the eye can see—but these rats aren’t soldiers. They have the luck of Seft himself, and it would be just our luck that one of them would go telling what had happened in some scummy tavern and the next lot we have to deal with will be ready for us.”
“Eventually someone will tell—” Kiron pointed out reluctantly. “But it would be good if we could keep the advantage of surprise for a while longer.” He scratched his head and looked out over the horizon. “All right. You senior riders track them down and round them up. And don’t take unnecessary chances.”
It wasn’t until the caravan itself arrived that they finished, and as the astonished merchants halted their beasts to stare, Kiron was pondering the second problem; what to do with twenty-some bound captives.
It was an interesting tableau, actually. On the road, the line of laden camels, blowing and looking nervously at the dragons. The dragons, ignoring them, all lounging happily, basking in the sun. The merchants, torn between apprehension and curiosity, The Jousters in their armor, some of which had already been removed because it was so cursed hot. And the captives.
Finally, curiosity won, and one of the merchants swung his leg over his saddle, slid down the side of his camel, and headed straight for Kiron.
The merchant was nothing if not bold. “So, Captain,” he said as soon as he came within earshot. “I can see you’re Jousters, but for which side? And why’ve you trussed up these men like chicken going to market?”
Kiron smiled. “We’re Jousters for Great King Ari and Great Queen Nofret, which makes us royal police of a sort. You could say we’re on your side, come to that. As for why these fellows are trussed up—if we hadn’t been patrolling when we were, they’d have ambushed you on this very spot.”
The merchant nodded. “Then you surely have our thanks. But this isn’t the sort of thing that Jousters do—”
“It is now,” Orest interrupted, with pride written in his very posture. “The Great Royals have given us our orders. We serve the people. We’ll watch the borders, and we’ll guard the roads.”
The merchant’s eyes started to light up; it was clear he saw all of the implications of this. “Are you police, or army?” he asked carefully.
Kiron thought that over. And felt a sharp pain in his ankle. Orest had just kicked him.
His startled glance won him a grimace from his friend, and the silently mouthed word “nomarchs.”
What—he thought, and then it struck him. The army answered only to its Captains, and the captains only to the generals and the generals only to the Great King himself. But the police, Royal servants though they were, answered to the nomarchs, the governors of provinces, and their line of command ended at the Royal Vizier, not the King. Their services could be commanded at any point by almost anyone in authority down to the headman of a small village.
So the Jousters, few as they were now, could find themselves spread thin over too much territory, and dependent for the keep and the care of their dragons on people who would think that the three-day-old stinking leavings from the butcher were “good enough” food for something like a dragon.
“The army,” he said quickly, earning a nod and a flash of grin from Orest.
“Ah,” the merchant looked a bit disappointed, but then his eye fell again on the bandits, and he brightened. “Then that makes these men war captives, true?”
Kiron nodded. The merchant grinned toothily. “Well, Captain, in that case, I am authorized to take them off your hands.” He fished inside the neck of his tunic and brought out a medallion on a cord. “I am an authorized dealer in war captives.”
“Tian, I presume?” Kiron asked, peering at the circle of stamped faience. He couldn’t make heads nor tails of it—
But Kelet-mat was Tian, and Kiron waved him over. He glanced at the medallion and grinned. “Looks like our problem of how to transport this scum is solved, Captain,” he said. The faces of the captives fell.
Kiron decided that some scare tactics might be in order.
“Well, it’s a good thing this fellow came along,” he said gruffly, loud enough for the captives to hear. “The Great King gave me field authority. I was going to try and execute them right here.” He paused. “I don’t know, I still might. The dragons are hungry.”
For one moment the merchant looked horrified, but as Kiron gave him a broad wink that the captives couldn’t see, his eyes narrowed and a ghost of a smile appeared.
“That’s a waste of good workers, Captain,” the merchant protested. “You can easily hunt down their camels to feed your dragons—”
“He’s right,” Orest chimed in. “Besides, there’s more meat on a camel.”
“All right, then,” Kiron said, sounding as if he had been persuaded, but was still a bit reluctant. “What’s the procedure here?”
The procedure proved to be fully as bureaucratic as he had suspected it would. Two copies of the list of captives with names and general condition had to be written up on the spot, with Kiron taking one to turn over to whatever Royal Scribe was in charge of such things. From there, he had no idea what would become of list or captives—
But, presumably, the lists would be checked against each other and against the actual captives before they went into the market. Kiron had heard that Ari had made a few changes to that procedure, to make sure that serfs weren’t treated as Kiron—then called Vetch—had been treated. These men had no notion just how much better their lives were going to be than his own had been.